Sustainable New Product Development: a decision-making tool for the construction industry

During the last decades, environmental sustainability has acquired growing importance in different productive sectors. The construction sector, aware of its environmental impacts, searches for mitigation within both processes and inputs. One of these mitigation strategies is the recycling of construction and demolition waste within the production chain. This paper deals with the proposition and application of a systematic decision-making tool in the context of the construction industry. The proposed procedure introduces a tool for Sustainable New Product Development using Quality Function Deployment to analyse the use of recycled aggregate for making concrete blocks in a multivariate context. That tool allows requirements identification and prioritisation considering the perspectives of both customers and developers, as well as standards and environmental aspects. Some results of a real case application are presented, and the benefits and potential barriers related to its adoption are discussed. These results contributed to the identification of trade-offs associated with the challenge of comparing alternative construction materials. It was also possible to identify that the use of recycled materials does not necessarily ensure that a product is more environmentally friendly than others.